I've thrown a lot at you in the course so far. And truth be told, if this were say, an enterprise workshop on gamification, I would've stopped after the last section. You've got all the basic concepts, you've got a design framework. You've got all of the components necessary to apply gamification successfully. But because this is a course, I want to go deeper. I want to push you to think about some of the conceptual issues around gamification and some of the big, deep questions about its future and about different ways to implement it. And so this is a good point in the course to take stock at a high level about just what gamification is, because it turns out that for many of the reasons that I've talked about, there are really two different kinds of gamification. Two different things that people mean when they use that word. Both to my mind are true examples of gamification and there certainly are plenty of places which, where they overlap, some of which I'll illustrate. But they're very different answers that you get to about gamification, depending on which of these two models you adhere to. And people use the same word gamification for both of them, and don't necessarily think about which one they are following. The best way I can think of to divide these two camps is to ask you the following question. Is this a game? This slot machine here which I've showed you before, is it a game? Well, if you use the definitions of games that I gave you early on in the course, probably not. There's no sense of a game-like or play-like attitude. There is no sense of meaningful choices here. The slot machine is just a big random number generator. You pull the handle, that's it, and it either gives you money or it doesn't. And, whether it gives you money or not, is not based on your skill and your play. It's just based on a random determination by the slot machine itself. So fundamentally, the slot machine is no different than just flipping a coin, time after time after time, and seeing if you get heads or tails. And that's not really a game, is it? On the other hand, many of the examples we have of social games on social networks online, as well as gamification, as I've talked about, look a lot like the slot machine. They create engagement loops which pull in the user by the potential of a reward. They involve surprise. They involve trying to find a pattern. And many people find them powerfully engaging. In many of the same ways that they find games powerfully engaging. So, there's something game-like about the slot machine, and we call it a game of chance. But, that's very different from most of the types of games that I described early on in defining what makes something truly game-like. And I think this is indicative of a broader split within the notion of gamification. There really are two different things going on when we use the term. One thing could be summarized as being about doing. Gamefication is about doing things using games and game-like structures. The other approach, I can over simplify by saying it's about feeling. It's about, not necessarily what you do, but how you feel about it, what's going on inside you. And this leads to a variety of different decisions that get made implicitly in which camp you're in. So where do you draw inspiration from? If you're focusing on doing things or getting other people to do things, then you will draw from disciplines like marketing and economics, disciplines that are about measuring behavior, and thinking about creating structures that encourage people to behave in certain ways. On the other hand, if you come from the feelings camp, you're going to look more to things like game design and cognitive psychology, these disciplines that are about what's going on that makes someone interested in something. What is there more deeply than the surface phenomena that they're experiencing? And we've already talked about both of these in the class, because the class is designed to give you both perspectives and show where they overlap. Similarly, if you're thinking in the first camp, you will talk about incentives, things that create some mechanism to pull someone to an activity. The other camp, you'll talk about experiences, what the person encounters, how they experience certain activities. again, the incentive is something outside of them, the experience is something inside them. The next one is do we talk about satisfying people's needs, people's desires, people's wants, or do we talk about fun? That term that as we talked about we can give meaning to and we can think systematically about how to design for fun, but it's something more than just meeting basic needs or even meeting higher level kinds of needs that people have. There's something, again, experiential and indivisible let this notion of fun. If you are in the first camp, you will gravitate more towards game elements, which I've talked about in great detail. And I say here inductive, in other words, the idea is building up from the bottom, little bits and pieces of games to move towards the more integrated experience. If you take the other approach, you will start with game thinking, which is more deductive, starting with general principles about how games work and using those to go down to the more specific examples. If you are in the first camp, you will think more about status. If you're in the second camp you'll think more about meaning. And I've talked about both of these in the psychological section, the appeal of status, and also its dangers. The first camp is P-B-Ls, points badgers leaderboards, the second camp is gamification as puzzles, as learning, as challenges which can be represented in systems involving game elements and points badges and leaderboards. But typically involve a different kind of approach, an approach that puts the challenges and the puzzles and the creativity at the center rather than the structural or visible elements. Rewards on the one hand, I've talked in great detail about reward design especially in the behaviorist tradition of psychology. Progression on the other hand. Mastery. Competence. Not necessarily about a reward, more about the journey. And finally and in summary, the first camp is about making users do things the second camp is about making players awesome. Making users do things should mean making them do things that they want to do on their own, but somehow don't get to. There are things that are beneficial for the player but the player needs some motivational help to push them along that path. It doesn't mean necessarily forcing someone or tricking someone into doing something that they never really wanted to do in the first place. Making players awesome is about figuring out in the first instance what it is that will help someone achieve their full potential, and focusing more on that, focusing more on the user's goals than the external goals of some organization or company, viz-a-vis those users. Now it should be evident by now that I tend to feel much more comfortable with this camp here on the right, with the more game-based approach to gamification, but I think it's important and essential really, to also understand the one on the left. Many game designers tend to be very dismissive or critical of gameification. And we're going to look in detail at some of those critiques later on in the course. And I tend to think that while their critiques do have some bite, the notion that gameifcation is fundamentally flawed and that looking for example at game elements as opposed to the more integrative structures of game thinking is fundamentally misguided. I tend to take issue with that because, as we've seen, there are lots of great examples of using the more doing-based approach to gamification to get to valuable results for companies and for users or players of the gamified system. So, both perspectives tend to be valuable. And in a specific case you may find one or the other is more helpful. But it's important to, as a starting point, be aware of these two approaches and be aware of where they come together and where they diverge.
